If you think you understand water treatment, think again, says Iain Rabbitts, who has over 25 years’ experience in the water services industry.
In principle, I know how to fly a plane, but I am not a pilot. In principle, I know how to take out an appendix, but I am not a doctor.
Running a water or wastewater treatment plant is perhaps not as immediately fatal as getting it wrong as a pilot or doctor, but our mistakes can be far-reaching and potentially far more lethal. We don’t just affect one or two people of even hundreds; we affect the lives of hundreds of thousands or even millions of people. We stop people getting sick and dying even before doctors are involved.
Even as an expert in the water business, there is lots I don’t know. If you regularly pilot a single-engined Cessna, that doesn’t mean you can fly an Airbus A380. As a GP, you probably understand the principles of open-heart surgery, but it’s not something you would attempt.
My experience is drinking-water treatment. When it comes to reticulation, pumping or wastewater treatment, I am not the person to talk to. I stay in my lane and am careful to do so. I have enough knowledge of the other aspects of the three waters to be dangerous and no more.
However, there are several problems that are endemic in our industry as a whole. I have done several drinking-water incident investigations over the years, and the problems come down to six things.
Lack of people: There are not enough people in this industry to make it safe. At the Water Industry Operators Group conference last year, I asked how many operators were on call every 5-6, 3-4 and 1-2 weeks.
The results were roughly (it was a show of hands) 20%, 60% and 20% respectively. That means that one in five operators is on call continuously or every other week. That is not sustainable.
Lack of knowledge: Our level of training and supervision of trainees is appalling. People are put in charge of treatment plants with no or inadequate supervision, and no training.
Lack of experience: We simply don’t have enough people with the relevant experience running these plants. We haven’t been adequately training people and when we do, we can’t keep them.
No operational support: There is often no one that the operators can turn to when they are experiencing a problem or need help. They are left on their own to sort out the issue.
Lack of funding of infrastructure: Far too often, the money taken for the three waters is frittered away on stadia or swimming pools, or it is simply not enough. We now have a staggering bow wave of work to do and not enough people to do it. One council I heard about released about 25 per cent of the revenue taken in rates for the three waters to the business unit for three waters. At least Local Water Done Well should stop this theft.
Lack of transparency: This is through to governance level. For a variety of reasons, the governance level hasn’t seemed to realise the problem. Whether this is because the council staff have got so inured to working within a budget and only tell council what they can do for the budget allocated (rather than what is needed to be spent) or because the politicians like to screw a plaque with their name onto another expensive civic facility rather than spend it replacing an underground pipe or the odour control roof over their wastewater plant, I don’t know.
Whenever an event occurs, all the above are, to greater or lesser extent, part of the problem.
In 2017 or 18, I sat down with then Local Government Minister, Nania Mahuta, and said: “There are three things we need to fix with water in New Zealand, funding, regulation, and capability and capacity to deliver.”
The regulation bit resulted in the formation of Taumata Arowai and latterly the Commerce Commission looking at the financial regulation. The funding bit was easy to solve – we just need a mechanism to get the money out of Auckland and distributed around the rest of the country. The hardest bit to solve was the capability and capacity. The formation of four water entities, while being three too many in my mind, was the start of this 30-year, generational programme. The only people who don’t think one entity is the right answer, seem to be politicians – the people in the industry acknowledge that that is the start of the solution. Overseas experience in Scotland, Ireland and Tasmania would support this too.
The other bit that needed to be sorted out was the accountability. The personal fines under the Water Services Act for everyone from operators to chief executives might cost you your house. The politicians at the governance level are immune from those fines, and yet they held the purse strings.
At least Local Water Done Well will mean that the directors of the new water entities will be personally liable. Let’s hope they have the backbone to tell the politicians what is required and not what the politicians think they can afford. As a note, I would never be on the board of one of the water entities, the personal risk is just too high, given the current starting point and the continuing political interference.
There is no way we can just find 5000 or 7000 trained water, wastewater and stormwater operators, supervisors, engineers, chemists, microbiologists, etc. overnight. It’s going to take us a long time. We need to develop training courses, make working conditions attractive, train those new people properly and retain them. That is going to take a generation.
Because Local Water Done Well was developed by an economist for politicians, it has focused only on the funding. It has completely neglected the investment required in people. It has failed to understand that the people running the treatment plants are not labourers but trained staff who carry an extraordinary amount of personal liability on their shoulders.
We can build as many treatment plants as we like, but if we don’t have the trained and experienced people to run them, we will continue to get major failures, spills, drinking water contamination and environmental catastrophes.
So, what should our training look like? My daughter Alice recently completed her electrical apprenticeship and is now a registered electrician. She spent four years working under supervision as an apprentice. She couldn’t even wire a plug without sign-off from a registered electrician. In addition to that she took theory and rules papers to demonstrate her understanding of electrics and regulations. She had to demonstrate expertise in many areas from programming to wiring switchboards to household appliances.
Compare that with your typical new hire in water or wastewater treatment who is maybe given some instruction over a day or two, a manual, and left to their own devices. And the electrical apprenticeship doesn’t compare with the training a doctor or a pilot need before they are allowed to practice. At the moment, being a new water treatment plant operator is a bit like giving a passenger the manual and asking them to fly the plane. Or giving the patient a medical textbook and saying, “Here, you take out the appendix”.
The courses we have available are good as far as they go, but they are too high level and not detailed enough. They don’t rely on working alongside a more experienced operator but on self-learning.
Producing information and working up the level of training I believe we require is hugely time-consuming and expensive. Getting 44 water entities to agree on investing in this is going to be nigh-on impossible. (Please prove me wrong.) Getting four entities to do so was, I believe, possible. It was Mahuta’s attempt to address the capability and capacity problem. I believe Local Water Done Well has put the water industry back between 10 and 20 years.
Already, I am hearing that some of the new amalgamations are trying to reduce the number of staff. Perhaps if we had fewer chief executives and fewer boards of directors, that would be the starting point for reducing staff costs. I think I am starting to sound like a stuck record …